Separating a parent from their young still developing child IS harmful. Both psychologically and even physically. Its well known how severing the parent-child connection leads to developmental issues and can even arrest physical growth. I used to work as a child counselor in a group home at one point and I can tell you first hand just how damaging removing a kid even from an unhealthy family situation is. Let alone from a nurturing parenting situation where they are on the run essentially already and stressed as it is and in a strange foreign place and that parent is the ONLY sense of security they have in the world. Ive seen kids get physically sick. Ive seen kids stop eating and become emaciated. Harm themselves. And Ive seen tons of them go from kids with normal personalities to troubled angry conflict seekers or withdraw and lose themselves to the point of catatonic dissonance.
I'm not sure why you wrote all this (and more), given that I said this earlier:
I already take for granted that this is all horrible and potentially traumatizing.
You don't have to demonstrate that separating children from parents is awful or harmful. Of course it is. I asked whether or not there was actually a direct physical threat or possibility of death, because you'd started responding to non-analogy claims with references to death.
Youre micro analyzing the analogy to try to undermine it.
I'm really not. I'm analyzing it at the most fundamental level: does the decision in the analogy involve similar logic and trade offs as the decision in reality? And it doesn't, at all. Which, let's be clear, is why most people use analogies in the first place: because they can make an argument sound better or worse through subtle (sometimes even unconscious) misrepresentation.
How bout just focus on what you know Im saying rather than spending all your focus on poking holes in a general analogy that works.
I'm usually a big fan of the "you know what I mean" posture instead of pedantic text analysis, but you can't play it after wondering aloud why I think we should read the Constitution to melting kids, or whatever cartoonish position you think you're arguing against here.
And YOU are the one condemning the idea of rescuing a child in danger because you think its more important to fix the entire fire code situation first.
Yeah, again, part of the reason I'm litigating your fire analogy is because you keep trying to sneak in blatantly false equivalences like "fire code." Like this is the legislative equivalent of needing the windows to be a few inches wider before we turn the hose on.
I've said a few times now that I think the notion--which your
entire position hinges on--that the executive order was actually faster was a fiction, or at least not remotely established.
How is that a strawman exactly? Is that not your point of view? My position is RESCUE THE CHILD. Your position is FIX THE LEGISLATION WHILE ITS URGENT.
No, that isn't my point. I really don't think you're reading these posts very thoroughly.
You really should be able to glean, just from the absurdity of the idea, that the person you're talking to has
probably not taken a cleanly adversarial position to "RESCUE THE CHILD." At minimum you should be able to guess that they think this is a false choice. Which, surprise, is actually what I think (and is what I've said).
Frankly I think thats a pretty heartless approach because when someone has chosen to put a child in harms way we should be doing whatever we can to take them OUT of harms way. Not say well now that theyre in harms way we may as well go ahead and come to an agreement about EVERY aspect of immigration so we can get this whole mess behind us. No. F that. WE GET THE CHILD OUT OF HARMS WAY. Period. ESPECIALLY since theyve been put in that position on purpose! You wanting to use this as an excuse to hash out legislation is essentially supporting Trumps use of these kids as pawns toward his political desires and thats disgusting to me.
If you're going to be so comically uncharitable as to ascribe a "disgusting" view to me, for something you have clearly misunderstood or misrepresented, then I suppose the equivalent would be for me to accuse you of grandstanding for going on at length about how separating children from parents is bad, even after I clearly said it was traumatic.
Or, we could just assume the other person is probably not heartless, and anything that makes them sound that way is probably a misunderstanding, and at least briefly consider what interpretations are consistent with being a non-heartless person. I think that'd be better.
Seriously? It worked! It took him an hour to pen an executive order and it was OVER.
You're really skipping over all the salient points. I literally just said this:
But that argument lives in that "world of ideals" where Trump would just do what you wanted immediately, rather than the real world where it predictably took days of outrage and hemming and hawing.
It took him an hour
once he decided to do it. That process of deciding and bringing the pressure to bear took days.
There is still an important general question about process, which I'm not going to abandon (or be cheaply shamed into pretending doesn't matter), but the more directly relevant point is that your method isn't actually demonstrably faster to begin with, unless you judge the legislative process by real-world timelines but magically exempt the executive order from the same, or only start the clock after all the outrage has accumulated.
Theres ZERO chance they would have come to a decision about a bill and passed it in the senate and the house and implemented it in that amount of time. Are you kidding?
Nope. You know how I know? Because they already had. Schumer unilaterally rejected any idea of a legislative fix, even though it appears to have already been drafted and had significant support. There was plenty of time to vote on it.
Pretty sure Ive already answered this question.
You haven't. You said it wasn't okay to violate that right, but you didn't explain the distinction between that situation and this one. See below:
And nope, I still dont see the analogy at all because there isnt one to the situation Ive been describing.
The logic is exceedingly simple: in one case, you're willing to do things that put people in danger to protect the integrity of the system. IE: it's better to let a clearly guilty person free on that technicality than to violate due process. In another situation, you think the danger (which, again, is not literal death or direct/immediate physical harm) must be stopped at any cost and requiring any kind of procedure is "stubborn." I'm asking why your conclusion in these two situations is different, since they clearly involve similar trade offs between process and imminent harm.
But I would ask you to justify why it is you think its more important to keep children in a harmful situation just so you can seek the chance of some elusive legislative final solution. Because thats what this all boils down to.
What "final solution"? We're talking about emergency legislation to counteract this one aspect, which had already been drafted.
At no point have I suggested that we need to fix the entire broken immigration system to stop kids from being separated from their parents.
Closed Thread
